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Blog postAccording to the gospel of Mark, (see Mark 6:3), Jesus of Nazareth had four brothers and at least two sisters.
That raises the question of how, exactly, these siblings were related to Jesus. Over the centuries, people have suggested three theories:
They were children of Mary and Joseph. They were children of Joseph by a previous wife. They were cousins of Jesus. I discussed all this in a previous blog post, Mother’s Day With Jesus, so I won’t go over that gro -
Blog postIn my last blog post, Jesus and Palm Sunday, I talked about how Jesus committed sedition by climbing on a donkey and riding down the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem.
Every Jew of his time knew the tradition of “Mashiach’s Donkey”—the oracle of the prophet Zechariah about a coming Mashiach (“Messiah” in English) who would someday enter Jerusalem riding on a donkey.
They knew many other traditions about Mashiach from oracles in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, Micah, a -
Blog postPalm Sunday celebrates the day Jesus entered Jerusalem in a remarkable procession that sealed his death warrant.
Historians don’t agree on the exact year of this extraordinary event. According to the gospel of John, it was a year in which Passover Eve fell on a Friday.
Most scholars would put this in either the year AD 33 or AD 30. I think the evidence leans a little toward AD 33, but it wouldn’t shock me if it was AD 30 instead.
On that fateful Sunday, Jes -
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Blog postNothing seems more ridiculous than to ask whether Jesus celebrated Valentine’s Day.
For one thing, Saint Valentine lived about 250 years after Jesus, and the feast honoring him was established in AD 496.
For another thing, many people would say that it’s sacrilegious and crazy to think Jesus might have had a wife or a girlfriend.
But a surprising number of people think that Jesus was secretly married, and that his wife was Mary Magdalene.
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Blog postSay the word “Samaritan” out loud, and most people will think you’re talking about a good guy. Somebody who’d stop to change your tire in the pouring rain. Somebody who’d help you make your rent payment if you were about to get evicted. Somebody who’d rescue a baby from a burning building.
The phrase “good Samaritan” is such a part of the English language that it’s easy to forget that it was once a contradiction in terms.
When Jesus was alive, his people believed that the only -
Blog postThe world we live in is a very different world than the world Jesus of Nazareth was born into.
A king ruled over Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. His name was Herod the Great, and he was a savage man who killed his favorite wife because he thought she was cheating on him. He killed three of his sons because he thought they might try to push him off the throne and steal it for themselves. The gospel of Matthew tells a story of how Herod the Great ordered the murders of all the infant -
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Blog postAmericans have been celebrating Thanksgiving for some hundreds of years now, and it’s easy to assume we invented it.
But the basic idea of giving thanks to God for a good harvest is an old idea.
In the time of Jesus, all Jews celebrated three different harvest festivals every year: Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles.
Now it’s true that each of these festivals was not 100% about the harvest. These festivals commemorated other things too. But each festival -
Blog postIt’s a little-known fact that the Bible tells three ghost stories, and two of them are about Jesus.
It’s hard to say how common ghost stories were at the time of Jesus and earlier, but we have quite an ancient ghost story in 1 Samuel, and we have two ghost stories in the gospels.
Let’s look at the ancient ghost story first, because it might possibly be related to one of the stories about Jesus.
The Ghost of Samuel The first king of Israel was Saul, a very tall ma -
Blog postThere is no doubt that Jesus and his family celebrated the Jewish New Year. They were Jewish, and they naturally celebated all the standard Jewish holidays. And they probably celebrated in Jerusalem. That was a major time commitment, as we’ll see shortly.
Several important holy days come in the fall, in the month of Tishrei:
Rosh HaShanah (the New Year) on 1 Tishrei Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) on 10 Tishrei Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles) from 15 to 21 Tishrei So the t -
Blog postIt sounds absurd to ask what Jesus did on his summer vacation.
Except that we know exactly what he did on his summer vacation, because the gospels make that very clear.
Jesus Had a Day Job Let’s start by noting the obvious fact that Jesus had a day job. He worked as a “tekton,” according to Mark 6:3. (This is the only verse in the Bible that says what Jesus did for a living.)
Note that “tekton” is a Greek word that means a manual laborer in stone, metal, or
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